Major elements and results of Stolipins agrarian reform (1906-1916)

The paper focuseson the economic foundations of Stolypins agrarian reforms. Relying on the well known and thoroughly verified primary sources on theproblem, the paper tries to analyze the economic content of the reforms major elements and results as an integral part of Russian peasantrysinclusion into the land-market and market-economy relationships. . The major strategic objective of Stolypins agrarian modernization wasto increase the agricultural productive forces, to improve the peasants well-being, to stabilize the social and political situation in thecountryside and to establish a societal foundation for monarchy and order in the face of prosperous land owners. According to P.A. Stolypin,Russias future agrarian system had to include small prosperous market-oriented households of peasantry and highly developed largecapitalist farms of land gentry. The reformers saw the way to achieve these objectives and develop a modern agrarian system through theestablishment of a free land market that had to provide for the transfer of land to efficient peasants by peaceful and economic means.Accordingly, the reform had three economic elements: 1) the market mobilization of community lands; 2) the expansion of the market forgentry-owned and state-owned land; 3) the support of the state to the peasants resettlement to Siberia and the development of the regionalland market. The destruction of the land community was the major component of agrarian transformations. The decree of November 9, 1906and the law of June 14. 1910 allowed the peasants to leave the community, to transfer their plots to private property and to move from acommunity parcel land usage to individual plots represented by farmsteads and cut offs. The law of May 29, 1911 established thatsettlements where the land redistribution had taken place would be considered to have moved to the hereditary ownership of land plots. Onthe whole, from 1907 to 1915 2.5 million households, or 27 % of community members, left communities and secured their lands as privateproperty. 2.8 million households with homestead ownership should be added. Consequently, 5.3 million peasants, or 40 % of their totalnumbers, became land owners. Applications for land redistribution were submitted by 6.2 millions, or more than 60 % of all the communitymembers. With the help of the Peasant Bank, peasants purchased 4 million dessiatinas of genry lands. On the total, they purchased 10 milliondessiatinas. From 1906 to 1916 3 million persons moved beyond the Urals, to the lands of the national colonization fund. Thus, the years ofthe Stolypin land reform saw the beginning of the development of a class of owner peasants and of the united land market (40 % ofcommunal and 20 % of gentry lands).The Stolypin reform pushed the countrys agrarian development along the road of the peaceful evolution. It created the prerequisites forthe economic victory of a peasant enterprise over a gentry estate in the sphere of agricultural production and in the land market. The reformunleashed the creative modernization potential of peasantry manifested in the rapid development of rural cooperatives. But the Stolypinmodernization remained unfinished - it was interrupted by the bloody epoch of revolutions and the civil war.

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